I went back and reread a lot of the posts on this thread. A lot of them talk about one extreme or another or both extremes.

We're not trying to build something like Google at work and I suspect that most companies aren't. We're also not a 90's-style dotcom with fooshball tables and Nerf guns being the tools of choice. We're also not a bunch of stuffed-shirts that toe the line every minute. We're friends from different walks of life with different skills and we have a common goal.

In order to achieve that goal, we need to communicate with each other, QA people, users, customers, hardware folks, and managers and we need to be good at what we do. We need people with the right blend of skills and cultural fit. Competence does not trump a good culteral fit and a good culteral fit does not trump competence... at least not where I work.

In other words, we just want good, normal people that can do the job well and that's what we hire. 🙂